"Globalization has taken our tongues from us," Jacques Lezra's essay begins, but the process started much earlier than we most often assume. For Lezra the common modern concept of the nation, associated with Renan, is a matter of a people's will, or more precisely a settled relation between will and language. But there is an earlier idea, which troubles just this relation, and Lezra subtly explores its manifestations in Renaissance grammarians, translators, and theorists of translation. In Covarrubias's dictionary, for example, to translate is both to take something from one place to another and to set something on the road—the first a complete action, a transaction between nations, the second a sort of unfinished adventure, a step into a space beyond the nation of departure. What Lezra calls an "insecure subjectivity" develops, and "upon this torn lexical ground, this broken, translated culture, early modern internationalism flourishes, like sown dragon's teeth."

"This torn spot is where a particular social freedom can be located," Lezra says, a thought echoed by Stathis Gourgouris's reading of Don DeLillo's novel The Names as an exploration of "the transgressive legacy of the Tower of Babel." "Our second chance at Babel," Gourgouris writes, "is to recognize......the force that enables societies to dare imagine themselves otherwise, beyond the Name." Beyond the name and beyond the nation, we might say. Language, no longer the

instrument of a domineering policy or purpose, no longer single-minded enough to command or receive commands, becomes the place where we slip away from the tyranny of the will.

Everywhere beneath these complex project and antiprojects, these large schemes for translating the world into various models of desire, lurks the notion of experience, which is the central focus of Sandra Bermann's essay on René Char. If we can translate within a language as well as from language to language, we can also translate from what Bermann calls the "lived historical event" to the legible trace of that event, and from starkly present experience to the spectral permanence of memory. No one understood the difficulty of this task better than Char, and through Bermann's delicate essay we understand precisely what is lost and gained in the writing and reading of these luminous fragments.

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